Posts in Category: Europe 2012

As border security in London dismantled my bag looking for drugs, they found another fun piece of contraband: my prized, five-inch hunting knife. I like to think that no one on the Eurostar train 9040 was going to f*ck with me. That was its last gift.

The Germans don’t make “good” beer. They make time-tested styles of beer, and their populace has long come to depend on a level of beer quality and service most cultures care not to maintain. Seriously, even the dive-iest sh**hole in the former East knows how to pour one with a perfect head. (The asian restaurant down the street…well, that’s a whole other story).

But any American who dabbles in craft beer connoisseurship will be utterly “whelmed.” Dare I say, “underwhelmed.”

One thing about ancient cities: they’ve spent a long time dealing with death. Paris is pretty ancient. In its catacombs, you can almost witness the point where dealing with the dead went from sacred memorial to menial job, until finally they ended up turning the dead into an art–a sort of sacred-memorial-menial-job hybrid.

Walking along a underground cavern lined with human skulls and ancient mausoleums isn’t the sort of thing that translates well into words. So we set Lily next to them and snapped some pictures–like some kind of “Adam’s Family Vacation” photo album.

Family. Cheese. Croissants. And, honestly, a lot less B.O. than I expected. Though the smell of urine permeates many corners, Paris is still a hell of a place to kill a few days. Hopefully, these photos serve as proof of that.

I was recently tearing up the floor of a bathroom in Leipzig, helped by a spaniard named Iván. Iván comes from northern Spain and speaks English the way I speak German–just enough to fool people into thinking you can understand what they say in response.

Ivan pries up floorboards laid down in either 1885 or 1950. Either way, we’ll both develop brain cancer from the mold and lead combination we breathed for two days. (Jacob Bielanski/2012)

Construction banter is funny when you don’t share a language. A lot of pointing, head shaking–in this instance, a drain on the 3rd-floor bathtub broke (or had been broken for a while, we’re not sure) and soaked the floor through to the ceiling below. A floor originally constructed in 1885 must be ripped up. To give you an idea, dirt and rocks are what they used for insulation between the joists. Iván and I pause frequently, sharing a lot of head shaking.

Once you figure out how not to crash cars while driving on the left side of the road, the island of “England” just opens up. You can virtually fling a dart at a map of the U.K. and hit a destination full of history and quaintness; in fact, that’s virtually what we did. On our way to Salisbury (for a giant cathedral) and Bath (for, well, ancient baths, I guess?) we found ourselves delightfully diverted to small churches and ancient castles.

This is a picture of me driving from the passengers side, as far as I’m concerned.

“I’m just going to hang up,” I hear Jamie’s voice through the car rental guy’s iPhone, “because I don’t know what to say.”

Yeah, ten minutes after renting a car, I side-swiped a parked Land Rover. The shocking part is that they immediately gave me another car. I took it, pondered the possibilities, and decided to go driving for a few days anyway. I’m glad I did.

Iceland Air apparently thinks that insanity is the reason people choose one country over another. Their ad campaign was specifically designed to glaze over a desirable feature of their home country in order to emphasize an inversely terrifying other feature. For example, one ad read “Iceland isn’t just known for it’s beautiful fjords and use of clean energy, but also for the fact that over 50 percent of the population believes in elves.”